The government should receive limited power and freedom from the people and not the other way around...

Maxims, rules of thumb and other observations on human cognition and sociocultural affectations

This will be added to on an irregular basis...

What is said to humans directly is received with skepticism and considered with dubiousness while that which is heard in passing, especially that which most conforms to their mentality or prejudices, is readily believed.

Humans have a certain cognitive latency between exposure to new information or experiences and the ability to think dispassionately and intellectually about it.

Humans have a certain cognitive spectrum starting with the moment of exposure to new information or experiences and ending with some point at which the thing is effectively "in the past" for them.

This cognitive spectrum is linked to the emotional process often referred to as shock, anger, denial and acceptance.

The more and faster information or experiences are presented to people and the closer the quarters and the lesser the distance between people, the more their early reactions in the passionate emotional stage are reflected back to them in the manner of responses to those reactions from others in light of those responses.

The more outrages which are suffered without sufficient time to allow emotional bleed-off, the farther the bar for subsequent reaction and outrage are pushed, and the more further events must progress before reaction and outrage.

It is possible for serious detriments to eventually sit below this threshold for long enough for their damaging effects to build and multiply until their entire society undergoes some reactive convulsion.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Police are like vampires. They shouldn't be invited into your homes," said Jamarhl Crawford, chairman of the New Black Panther Party in Roxbury, who moderated the meeting.

"Vampires are polite; they're smooth," he said in an interview the following day. "But once they get in, the door closes. Havoc ensues."

Other comparisons have been no more favorable.

"The community doesn't want this," Lisa Thurau-Gray, managing director of the Juvenile Justice Center at Suffolk University Law School, said at the meeting. She likened the police persistence to a sexual aggressor who refuses to stop assaulting a victim despite her pleas. "What part of no don't they understand?" she said.

What part? Any part. Because our government, when it comes to law enforcement, is possessed by an assumption of guilt of all suspects and all people not law enforcement are suspects. When the only tool in your box is a hammer, ever problem looks like a nail. The nail that sticks up, gets pounded down. Does this seem familiar to you now? It's the de facto state of American law and order. Law above all else, including and indeed most especially the the spirit behind having laws. Not to provide for the common good, but the empowerment of those who enforce it, and their masters.

We have a federal government that is presently earnestly arguing in multiple court venues against constitutional protections limiting law enforcement searches and seizures, and arguing in favor of warrantless wiretaps, and using things found in those explorations to justify warrants after the fact, which is a bedrock NO-NO of our nation.

Now then, the most clueless people here are the Boston Police who despite the long history of abuse of minority communities by police, and political abuse of black American society, and the current abuses of power by various state governments and the federal government, still live in a totally different world where the police walking door to door offering to search your home and clear you of suspicion when there was none to begin with and no cause for same is a perfectly fine and normal idea.

No, no, we don't suspect you of anything, but why take chances? We'll search you now and clear you up front. Wink wink nudge nudge...